How-To Geek

While it hasn't had the best reputation lately, Plex is still one of the biggest platforms around for streaming your own media — and it's down right now.

For years, a handful of familiar SUVs have dominated sales charts with little challenge from the competition. But 2026 has shaken up the market, with supply constraints, shifting buyer priorities, and changing powertrain strategies giving some models an unexpected opportunity to climb the rankings.

Every few years, the PC gaming world gets handed a piece of tech that's supposed to change everything, and then it just kind of ... sits there. Ray tracing took the better part of a decade. VR is still figuring itself out. And then there's DirectStorage, which Microsoft announced back in 2020 but has barely been used since.

After months of predictions, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences announced the nominations for the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards, which will air on NBC on September 14, 2026. One of the networks that garnered a significant number of nominations was Netflix with 111. Speaking of Netflix, the streamer landed key nods in Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Drama Series, and Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series.

Google already has a relatively small presence in my mobile life. Most of my favorite apps now come from F-Droid, and I long ago swapped out Gmail for Proton Mail. When I recently revisited LineageOS, I got a taste of just how far the open source alternatives to Google have come. Removing the tracking from your phone still comes with sacrifice, but not as much as you might think.

Spotify just made controlling music as easy as talking to a friend. The streaming service is introducing a "conversational experience" beta for Premium subscribers that let you have back-and-forth voice or text conversations to control and learn about whatever you're playing.

I have hated using barrel jacks as power sources for years, but never realized that I wanted a USB-C-powered mini PC until I tried out GEEKOM's latest IT13 Max system. While you can power other mini PCs with barrel jacks, GEEKOM went the extra mile and built in a Power Delivery port just for that purpose.

Watching a new show and constantly changing the volume is one of those small issues that has only gotten worse. Loud action scenes blast you back in your seat, then someone starts talking, and you can't make out a word. Sometimes, the show was badly mixed, but that's not always the case. The usual issue is a combination of things that started long before the content ever reached your TV, and it may be the reason you can’t hear the dialogue.

Performance sedans aren't as easy to find as they used to be. As SUVs continue to dominate showroom floors, the few that remain have become increasingly expensive, with many now starting well north of $40,000.

A Home Assistant dashboard can be a useful way to see key information about your smart home or even to control your smart home devices. You can spend a small fortune setting up a large, high-end wall-mounted dashboard, but you don't have to break the bank. There are plenty of ways to build your own Home Assistant dashboard for under $20.

Google Maps is one of the most convenient apps, and we use it so much that it's easy to ignore or overlook some of its more frustrating aspects. A prime example is all the autoplaying videos when you look up a restaurant in Maps, then click through to the results. Here's how to put the brakes on those videos.

You might think that a brand new HDD is the safest it's ever going to be, but that's not true. Worse yet, just like an SSD can fail at 100% health, an HDD can fail without showing any SMART errors whatsoever.

I have always had a rocky relationship with smart bulbs. I never really saw much benefit beyond the initial novelty, which wore off rather quickly.

When you hear "open source" it's natural to immediately think of Linux, but what software license an application uses has nothing to do with which operating system it runs on.

Android 17 is the year’s big version update, but it’s admittedly not the most exciting one we’ve seen in recent years. That’s not to say there’s been nothing useful added, though. One of the quieter new features will make location access a much more locked-down permission.

Copying around a couple of small files, like screenshots or documents, is, for the most part, normally fine. They’re normally small files, and you won’t have much trouble moving them around. The problem, however, comes when you actually have to move around a file that’s several gigabytes in size, or worse, several of them—using the regular tools meant for that purpose, your PC will be struggling.

While UniFi used to be seen as an SMB or enterprise-only networking option, it has increasingly become a more consumer-friendly networking platform. Here are four features that make UniFi a real alternative to Amazon's eero platform.

Lightroom is still the go-to editor for many people who shoot RAW photos. But it comes with an expensive subscription and the desktop version feels increasingly neglected in favor of its cloud-based companion. If you’d rather keep your files on your own computer instead of syncing everything online, darktable is one of the best free alternatives.

ESP32 boards have become a popular choice for hobbyist projects and smart home sensors. For many projects, they can be a better choice than a Raspberry Pi, since they're cheaper, use less power, and are still very capable. For some things, however, the Raspberry Pi still wins.

Ever since Linux distributions gained a cult following among computer users in the '90s, they dreamed of overtaking Windows as the most widely used desktop OS. One company tried to do it by creating a distro that was as Windows-like as possible. This effort, Lindows, attracted the ire of Microsoft, but a trademark lawsuit almost backfired on the software giant.